I love the way they've gone fishing for the turbo on the LeMans engine [pic 9]is that the actual instal on the car , or just for display ?

Yes, whoever built the Cadillac LMP display had their work cut out for them as originally, the turbo installation was draped all over the back half of the car. The display builder had to devise some way to make it a stand-alone deal on an engine pedestal.

An FYI... The slideshow function loads the photos in random order each time a viewer loads the page. I configured it that way to keep things simple.

Because that's what you get when you weld two 6.7 litre 500 hp engines together. See designing engines is easy, I don't know why they make such a fuss about it.

Fifty bucks says it never deliberately exceeded 4000 rpm at full throttle on a dyno or in a car.

You'd lose that particular bet. The V16s have tens of thousands of miles on them, both in the Sixteen concept shown here and in an SUV mule with a stretched nose.

The Sixteen is still out running. The photos above were taken in February of this year. I included the trunk photo to show that the Sixteen concept is also a fully functional and instrumented test vehicle.

The V16 is based on the LS V8 architecture but it's a bit more involved than two V8 blocks welded together. Different bank angle for one thing; new block, heads, crank, cam.

This deal came surprisingly close to production greenlight and is not totally deceased yet.

Now if one wanted a attention getting set-up that cost a fraction of Italian carbs, put something similar on a lessor hyped sixties/seventies muscle car, say a Javelin, set-up for very sporting driving.

Of course one would have the task of keeping them tuned, although again, much cheaper than the Italian jobs.

Interesting how they have attempted to capture some of the flavour of the original production Caddy V16's from the 1930's.

Absolutely. Good eye. The 2002 V16 was quite deliberately styled as a callback to the 1930 V12/V16. (There was also a 1938 V16 but it was ugly as sin, looked like a pancake bus engine.) Cadillac has repeatedly revisited the >eight approach through the years.... it would serve as a powerful brand differentiator in the luxury class, for one thing. The way I hear it, they just took one more run at it in recent months, but were apparently turned back by impending CAFE requirements and, let's face it, the entire market moving in the opposite direction.

Here's a 1963 attempt to do a V12, but this time around they did a 472/500 CID V8 instead.

Running scale-model engines are always among the most popular items at MCG. According to the traffic, people go nuts over them. Besides, I like them. To me they are fine art. Here is one of the nicest ones yet, a quarter-scale Offy 270. Check it out.

I read an article years ago, it was in Road & Track I believe, that Chevrolet built a Corvette V12 prototype in the 90s, any info on that one?

They had a C4 Corvette built with a Falconer V12 (which is a V12 SBC, pretty much) but I don't think there was ever any production intent in that direction. That said, just because I didn't know about it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

I can think of several factors mitigating for and against such a thing:

At around that time at least two of the Detroit three were looking at V12 and V10 versions of their small-block V8s as a cheap way to do a truck engine. Chrysler (truck V10 and Viper) and Ford (Triton) actually ended up doing them.

The SBC V8's output limit is knock as the center cylinders are very difficult to cool. (The head us EIIEEIIE, among other things.) This was the impetus behind the backward cooling on the Gen II/LT1 SBC V8, which was only partially effective. A V10 or V12 SBC would be that much worse.

There was never any mention to me of a pushrod engine, and I can't remember off-hand how I was briefed. Certainly it (the drawing) was based on the 4-cam 265A/B or even C, but there are differences, such as the protrusions on the cam covers. The timing chest has front camshaft bearing bosses, so this drawing is definitely not a pushrod engine. There is a possibility, I suppose, that the intended engine would have been a pushrod, but when you consider the lengths that Ilmor and Penske went to three years later, to hide any possible hint of what they were up to with the 500I, it's not surprising that my drawing was intended to convey only what the badging would look like.